For personal - building your won is best imo or get a friend who knows how to do it for you.

Dan

So naturally my advice is to hit up Tiger Direct and newegg.com and build the system of your dreams.

Our initial purchases were Dell laptops, but after a couple poor service experiences we stopped ordering from them.

The reason I went with a built system this time is because my time has become increasingly short and valuable to me. My last computer I spent a lot of time fixing a problem hard drive (Windows loaded fine, but if it lost power everything went out of memory and the hard drive barfed.) If I have a problem, I can still do basic trouble-shooting, but no more spending a week swapping in and out parts to figure out which one of the parts was bad. I spend a week waiting for the computer to get sent back. As a bonus, the company loaded up a lot of things that I would load myself; there was a pleasant lack of crapware on the machine, too, a big bonus over a lot of the other larger companies. The company also did a “burn in” test, so I knew I’d at least get something that’s been started up a few times.

I bought this computer so that I had a faster computer to work on a contract I was just starting. So, getting something that would let me get to work quickly was a huge bonus.

Thankfully, I still know enough about computers I can upgrade if I need. In fact, I pulled out some parts in the new computer to test my old one when the video card died. :/ But, I was able to find the problem quickly!

Some further thoughts.

Also I happen to like a big tower case and must companies want to sell you a half tower or a mini-tower. I just prefer to buy the components I want.

Also nowadays I believe if you buy a stock computer it comes with Vista preloaded and I sure don’t want to be saddled with Vista.
I think having Vista installed is a BIG NEGATIVE.

I still wish they made bigger cases to make them easier to work inside of !

Also I happen to like a big tower case and must companies want to sell you a half tower or a mini-tower. I just prefer to buy the components I want.

Also nowadays I believe if you buy a stock computer it comes with Vista preloaded and I sure don’t want to be saddled with Vista.

I still wish they made bigger cases to make them easier to work inside of !

Accept that Customer Service is going to be bad, and shop based on price, hardware and support agreements, much less dissapointment that way.

So far as laptops go … I dunno, MacBook Air laptops are really really nice, they run Vista/XP and most flavors of Unix just dandy. MacBook Pros are nice too if you need more umpf, and they run Vista/XP/Unix fine as well. I’ve had a MacBook Pro for a year and some now running Leopard / Vista with pretty much no issues. It’s a year old so it’s not the fastest thing in the world but I’m not using it as a primary development platform, I still use a desktop for all of that nonsense (laptop monitors are too small for art!). All in all Leopard is pretty nice (shhh don’t tell any of our friends I said that!).

There are a lot of UMPC models around now too that are pretty swank if you don’t need something ‘life size’. =)

I recently built a 3.0Ghz Intel C2D with 4GB of ram and a Radeon 8800GT for about $750 after shipping. The cheapest I can price out that PC from dell today is $1179, without any kind of additional warranty.

I am my own warranty. I’ve never had a major problem with the PCs I’ve built; the parts either work out of the box or they don’t.

Obviously in the business world, when you need multiple workstations, you gotta go with dell or compaq but for your own personal PC, DIY is the way to go.

At work most of our computers are Dells. For a time we where buying from IBM instead but had nothing but problems with them. HP has been trying to get us to switch but our desktop guys haven’t been impressed.

I think if you want to avoid the same customer service frustrations you’ll have to find a smaller vendor. I know my wife had similar problems with HP so we refuse to deal with them anymore.

As for Macs, I’m using a MacBook Pro as my laptop now and loving it. I can do most of my day to day stuff in OSX and a quick reboot lands me in XP and it’s a fine windows machine. I know several people that have MacBooks that they use exclusively as XP machines. Oh, and most importantly it can easily play EQ2 and other games as well as almost any laptop out there

On the laptop front, I’ve actually quite liked Toshiba. I had a monster desktop replacement computer for a few years. Rather durable, and it had a really nice, big screen. My better half got a tablet PC from them which has been really reliable as well. We have an “authorized repair center” nearby, too, which has given us prompt and friendly warranty service when we’ve had problems with either computer. It’s nice to be able to drop off and pick up the computer on your own terms instead of having to mail it somewhere.

My current laptop is a Dell, which I got on discount from a friend of a friend; however, from the stories I’ve heard, I’m rather glad that I have not had many problems with it. It has worked really well for what I wanted: long battery life and enough horsepower to do document editing and light gaming on the road.

Some thoughts.

I do know there’s a way to turn on keyboard access to various UI components as a system-wide option, but I don’t know if it’ll support your exact key preferences. I always just use the ubiquitous command-s for saves and skip the menu entirely.

Actually, I was pretty happy with my Alienware experience, but I haven’t had much interaction with their service folks, and I’m not sure how integrated it is these days with the Dell mess you’re describing. I’m still running strong on the Alienware I bought during the EQ2 beta, so I’m looking forward to seeing what else folks suggest.

In my experience with a variety of providers on the business side of things, the big-boys behave like you describe, but in a somewhat cyclical manner. If you’re seeing articles on the web describing how poor a company’s support is (particularly on less “technical” sites), they’ve probably already corrected the problem. From a business standpoint, it may be easier to deal with a company that specializes in service, and buys the hardware for what it is, a commodity at commodity prices. The catch is, that’s not always the cheapest equation on the market.

On the office front, I’ve been seeing and hearing better things about HP these days. Their latest desktops have been fairly solid, relatively easy to work on or upgrade, and the prices aren’t unreasonable (especially if you don’t mind a refurb).